Back in July when the Boston Celtics formally introduced the players acquired from the Brooklyn Nets as part of this summer’s nine-player blockbuster swap small forward Gerald Wallace was absent excused from the press conference to attend the start of his youth basketball camp in his native Alabama.

Seventy-three days later with training camp less than a week away the former All-Star still hasn’t made an appearance at his new basketball home. So when a reporter noted to Celtics president of basketball operations Danny Ainge on Tuesday that Wallace remains an intriguing figure because he hasn’t spoken to the media Ainge smiled and offered “I’m right there with you. I’m anxious to meet Gerald.”

The two crossed paths briefly a lifetime ago when Wallace was a fresh-faced rookie in Sacramento and Ainge was doing TV work. Now Ainge is presiding over his second Boston rebuild and 31-year-old Wallace is the heftiest contract on his books (three years $30.3 million).

“I haven’t had much conversation with him. He’s really the only one” said Ainge. “He’ll be in town I think next week.”

The Celtics open camp in Newport R.I. on Oct. 1. Media day when all players are typically available to reporters is one day earlier at the team’s training facility in Waltham.

Now don’t misconstrue. This doesn’t appear to be any sort of holdout situation. Ainge said it’s often difficult to track down players in the offseason particularly veterans noting “It’s a nightmare trying to get ahold of the players in the summertime. I was the same way when I was a player.”

But with just about everyone else on Boston’s roster dropping by the team’s practice facility in recent weeks and others returning early for informal workouts Ainge is most certainly eager to sit down with a player that’s due to earn $10.1 million next season.

It’s not an understatement to say that the speed at which the Celtics will navigate this rebuild/transition process hinges a great deal on Wallace. Boston needs him to play well regardless of whether he spends three years here or not.

For his part Ainge seems hopeful the Celtics can help rekindle Wallace’s game.

“I obviously have watched him play a lot of basketball” said Ainge. “It’s interesting Gerald was a guy that got a good contract in Charlotte was their best player when they went to the playoffs [during the 2009-10 season] and that led to a big payday for him. He was traded for two first-round picks to Portland [and] played very well in Portland to the point where New Jersey wanted to give away [the No. 3 pick] Damian Lillard to get him. And then New Jersey wanted him back enough to pay him a very lucrative contract.

“It seems that everywhere he’s been he’s been well-liked and well compensated. He’s a good player. It wasn’t a great fit for him in [Brooklyn] last year but we’ll try to make it a better fit for us.”

GW is an interesting enigma. I wouldn't read too much into his lack of visibility at this point.

At a healthy 31, he should have 3-4 more years of productivity. He is an excellent defensive player with a 13PPG / 6 RPG career average. He could be a long term very effective backup to Green and adds some much needed veteran presence. So we could keep him long term, despite his contract because we should have cap space beginning 2014.

On the other hand, some playoff-bound team may offer enough quality in Feb trade deadline, but I don't think Wallace is a throw-away player by any stretch. He could be worth the equivilent of a mid first round draft pick or quality backup PG.

Dude's 31 years old, was just traded to a rebuild team and is in the middle of a $10MpY contract. He has no incentive to show up early.

He'll show up for training camp when he's suppose to. If he doesn't, then it becomes a story.

There is no connection between his contract and "incentive to show up early". He has other commitments (basketball camp) in Alabama. As another poster implied, Wallace has demonsrated high character and work ethic. That is the main thing. This is a non story.

Dude's 31 years old, was just traded to a rebuild team and is in the middle of a $10MpY contract. He has no incentive to show up early.

He'll show up for training camp when he's suppose to. If he doesn't, then it becomes a story.

There is no connection between his contract and "incentive to show up early". He has other commitments (basketball camp) in Alabama. As another poster implied, Wallace has demonsrated high character and work ethic. That is the main thing. This is a non story.

Thats exaclty what I said...

And there is a correlation. For example, Humphries has shown up early and its been reported that he had been working very hard at improving his game while in LA. This most definitely has something to do with his age (28) and his contract (expiring). He is eligable to get another $20-$40 million if he shows his commitment and plays to that level.

And there is a correlation. For example, Humphries has shown up early and its been reported that he had been working very hard at improving his game while in LA. This most definitely has something to do with his age (28) and his contract (expiring). He is eligable to get another $20-$40 million if he shows his commitment and plays to that level.

If Humphries and Wallace show up with improved game and in shape it is a major plus for the Celtics. They are both quality sincere players with serious personal pride in their game and team.

The year begins with coach in camp all else is strictly prep unless they have been training off season with coach which I doubt!

From what I've read (very little) the basketball camp was running at the the of the press conference and tha was why he was a no-show. However, its unclear if this basketball camp is something that continued until today... I have a feeling it did not. Therefore my prior arguments stand.

He hasn't even talked to Danny Ainge after last season's disaster in Brooklyn, but it looks like that's about to change. It would be tough for Wallace to play any worse than he did for the Nets last year, but even if he shows modest improvement, he's still not worth more than a late-round flier at this stage of the game.

Gerald Wallace played 31 1/2 minutes on Saturday night without taking a shot. It didn't register as a super big deal at the time, because there was other stuff to talk about — namely, his current team (the
Brooklyn Nets)
beating his former team (the
Charlotte Bobcats), point guard
Deron Williams (32 points and six assists) continuing his
post-All-Star surge, Reggie Evans posting his league-leading eighth 20-rebound game of the season and the Nets adding a half-game to their lead over the Chicago Bulls for the East's No. 4 seed (they added
another on Sunday, thanks to the Detroit Pistons).

As has been the case for most of this Nets season, Wallace flew under the radar a bit in the immediate aftermath of the game, even though he'd clearly passed up some open looks en route to ending the game with just one point after splitting a pair of free throws. That changed a bit after the fact, though, as the 30-year-old small forward discussed the circumstances behind the rare gun-shy game — just the fourth time in nine seasons since becoming an NBA starter he'd failed to take a shot and only the second such game in which he'd played more than 12 minutes — with Tim Bontemps of the New York Post.

The oh-fer served as the nadir of a dreadful post-All-Star stretch for Wallace, and he pulled no punches in his self-assessment — he's flat-out shook when he gets the ball these days:

“My confidence is totally gone,” Wallace told The Post Saturday. “I’m just at the point now ... I’m in a situation where I feel like if I miss, I’m going to get pulled out of the game, you know what I’m saying? So my whole concept is just that you can’t come out of the game if you’re not missing shots.

“I think I lost the confidence of the coaching staff and my teammates. So my main thing is those guys can score, so instead of thinking about it so much, just trying to focus on defense, try to move the ball and get those guys shots.”

First thing's first: It's pretty understandable that Wallace has zero confidence in his offensive game right now, because there's not much cause for confidence. He wasn't exactly an offensive dynamo earlier in the season, but he's fallen off a cliff since mid-February.

Before the All-Star break, Wallace was averaging 8.9 points per game on 43.2 percent shooting and connecting at a 35.1 percent clip from beyond the arc — not stellar numbers and down from his career per-minute averages (15.6 points and 7.3 rebounds per 36 minutes entering the season, 10.2 and 6 before the All-Star break), but everybody expected his scoring numbers to drop off on a team featuring Williams, Brook Lopez and Joe Johnson. But fourth option or no, his post-All-Star decline's been just awful — he's kicking in just 6.5 points per game, shooting 33.8 percent from the floor and 64.6 percent from the free-throw line (by far his worst performance at the line in a half-dozen years), and has made only seven of his last 47 attempts (a woeful 14.9 percent) from 3-point range.

And it's not just that his jumper's been janky; the misery's been pretty well spread-out, according to NBA.com's shot location stats. Yes, Wallace's accuracy has dropped by nearly 10 percent on corner 3-pointers and by just under 25 percent on above-the-break triples, but his field-goal percentage is also down just under 12 percent on shots taken inside the restricted area; on top of that, he's getting a significantly higher share of his interior tries blocked, as Bontemps noted.

About 85 percent of Wallace's shots this season have come from one of those three floor locations — his highest mark since five years ago, when he basically lived at the rim and rarely fired from deep with the Bobcats — so if he's not getting buckets at the rim or from beyond the arc, there's not a whole lot of offensive punch he can provide an offense. (Wallace has been a league-average-or-below mid-range shooter virtually his entire career, peaking at a 38.4 percent success rate between the paint and the arc during the '06-'07 season.) While he's a decent facilitator, dishing just over three assists per 36 minutes of floor time, he's also turning the ball on a higher percentage of possessions than he has in eight years.

Basically, there just aren't a whole lot of positive things that are likely to happen when Wallace has the ball right now, and it's difficult to see a scenario in which he turns that around significantly in time for the Nets to do any real postseason damage. Brooklyn coach P.J. Carlesimo said he'll look to "post [Wallace] up" to get him jump-started, which seems like a less-than-stellar plan considering Wallace is shooting 35.5 percent on post-ups and producing just 0.58 points per post possession (158th in the league), according to Synergy Sports Technology's play-tracking data.

Synergy's numbers shows what the eye has long told us about Wallace — that when it comes to scoring, he's most effective as a scorer in transition and getting to the basket on off-ball cuts. And Carlesimo acknowledged that, too, saying that the Nets "have to get him some other things, on the wing, on the fast break, move him without the ball" to try to shake him loose. But it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense for Brooklyn to juggle the offense too much to get Wallace involved — after all, the version of the Nets that plays at the league's second-slowest pace and ranks in the bottom five in fast-break points per game still boasts the league's ninth most efficient offense, and has actually been scoring at a better per-possession rate since the All-Star Game than before it, even with Wallace's struggles.

Sure, providing some more flexibility within half-court sets to move off the ball rather than spotting up on the perimeter could help get Wallace some easy buckets, but if that at all messes with the spacing (hey, sometimes defenses even guard guys who can't shoot) that's enabled Williams and Lopez to go great guns offensively of late, is it worth it? Yes, in the long run, you want to get Wallace back to being a productive member of a competitive offense, considering you're paying him $30.3 million over the next three seasons, but returning him to someone who could provide 15 and 10 in a playoff series seems increasingly like a pipe dream irrespective of how Carlesimo might tinker with the offense.

Perhaps the biggest bummer of all is that Wallace clearly knows this, and that despite how many shots he gets up or how much time he puts into trying to work into a rhythm, he's left in a position where all he can really do is try not to mess things up too much. More from Bontemps:

“I’ve been working and I’ve been shooting, but it’s hard,” Wallace said. “Regardless of how much work I’m doing on my shot, the fact of the matter is it is what it is.

“I’ve been in the league 12 years. Am I mad about not being out on the court? Am I mad about not making shots? Yeah. But my main thing is I’m trying to stay on the court. I know I can play defense, make plays for the other guys and try to do some things to help me stay on the court.”

You don't like to hear the repeated emphasis of "help me stay on the court" — if you don't have it, Gerald, you're hurting more than you're helping, which is why the minutes go down — but credit Wallace for trying to turn into the skid and focus on having a bigger impact as a passer and defender (where he's done a pretty sound job holding down opposing small forwards this year) as he tries to get right. If he can, he could provide an extra surprise spark that could help the Nets get past the opening round and make a good showing in Round 2; if he can't ... well, considering the way the Nets' offense has operated without his help and the fact that the Miami Heat loom in a prospective second-round matchup, that really might not matter too much.

Well, not in the grand scheme of the title chase, that is. In the larger picture, it'll matter to the die-hards who fell in love with the full-court, full-throttle game "Crash" played in Charlotte, who miss seeing it at its apex, and who now can't help wondering — as we watch him struggle at the rim and throw up flat jumpers — if maybe the foot, ankle, knee, rib and heel injuries he's had this year, and 12 full years of those dings and worse, have finally come home to roost. It'll matter to us, and it'll suck.

GW lost his confidence and his very capable game in NJ last year. Backup to Green is the BEST for him and the team. (there is no chance he would/could play either PF or SG) Coming off the bench at SF, he can slowly regain his mojo without the immediate pressure as a starter and the Celtics can limit his exposure to plays called for him, while he is in the game, to showcase his (hopeful) regained talents in prepararion for a trade.

If he is only 75% of what he was 2 years ago, he can help most playoff bound teams and we should be able to get a first round pick or quality backup PG for him in trade.

Whether he was motivated by the results of the preliminary election for Mayor, or coming to the realization that he stands to make 10.1 million dollars by doing so: According to Jeff Goodman of ESPN, Gerald Wallace has arrived in Boston and will be reporting to Celtics camp today.

While the Celtics can't really be encouraged by the late arrival, lack of communication or recent play of the former all-star, they may be encouraged by his passion for wearing headbands (and by the hope that he could return to form).

Expect more details to come as we come closer to the start of Boston Celtics media day at 1 o'clock. Celticslife will provide continuous coverage throughout the day.

"He will be in town I THINK next week"! This could potentially be a BIG problem!

GW is owed 30-million over the next 3-years!

Wallice and Humpries brought it last nite! Combined with Jerad and OK they are a core of this team's future! ADD RR!! and a major 2 as well as a big..the Celtics will cause problems this year! I did like Crawfords play! Great passing and good shooting!!